Adverts could soon be tailored according to the background noise around you when using your smartphone, if a patent application by Google becomes reality.

The search engine giant has filed for a patent called ‘Advertising based on environmental conditions’.

As that title implies, it’s not just background sounds that could be used to determine what adverts you seen on your mobile phone. The patent also describes using ‘temperature, humidity, light and air composition’ to produced targeted adverts.

Well, ignoring the privacy thing, the patent makes me angry. How can something like this be patentable? Isn't there supposed to be something non-obvious in a patent? More and more patents seem to be related to the "what to do" question instead of the "how to do it" question.

What no one has pointed out is that a good quality phone should not pick up the background noise to analyse!

With iPhone's popularity everybody is conditioned to know such a thing does not exist

Not quite.

Remember that Google is writing a mobile OS... Big thing there.

For background noise removal, all that happens AFTER the mic. So it's pretty much trivial to get the full mic, find the background noise and analyse it, then process the sound to remove the background noise for the normal phone call.

Oh, and did you know that the same thing is going on in other consumer electronics? (Yeah... the rabbit hole goes down pretty deep...)